PHILADELPHIA — Fifty years ago Sunday, the Eagles played the Dallas Cowboys at the Cotton Bowl, in a game whose details have since been consigned to microfilm spools, digital newspaper archives, and the waning light of old men's memories.
The Cowboys won, 21-17, to improve their record to 5-2; they reached the Super Bowl that season, losing to the Baltimore Colts. The Eagles' loss was their seventh in seven games, though they had shown considerable fight against a superior opponent, scoring a touchdown with 50 seconds left in regulation to pull within four points, then attempting to recover an onside kick. But a Dallas player, on the field as part of the team's kickoff-coverage unit, wrapped his hands around the bouncing, zigzagging football, and the Cowboys ran out the rest of the clock.
The player was Richmond Flowers Jr., whom Dallas had selected in the second round of the 1969 NFL draft. At the University of Tennessee, Flowers had been a receiver and tailback on the football team and an Olympic-caliber sprinter and hurdler on the track team, touting himself as "the fastest white boy alive." The Cowboys had admired his athleticism and toughness — "I was a big Richmond Flowers fan," Gil Brandt, the Cowboys' director of player personnel at the time, said — but his name carried an additional power and resonance that had nothing to do with sports.
When the Cowboys drafted Flowers, Brandt had been aware of that power and its source. He had not been aware until recently of an action that Flowers had taken, while still at Tennessee, that defined it.
